Where’d You Go, Bernadette?
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Runtime: 109 minutes
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is an interesting film, because exactly what it is about is hard to pin down. It’s partially about a woman trying to rediscover who she is. It’s partially about a daughter trying to understand two giant minds she’s stuck with. It’s partially a love letter to architecture, although that might be missing the point. Richard Linklater is a director who is very content throwing away traditional narrative structures and just sticking a camera on figures and watching. He finds the way people behave more interesting than the way they are ordered to behave by plot. There are surely some that say that character is the driving force of narrative, but maybe more interesting than characters, at least sometimes, are people?
Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett) is a mother and wife. Her husband, Elgin (Billy Crudup), seems like the supportive family man with your traditional job developing mind reading tech for Microsoft. Their daughter, Balakrishna or “Bee” (Emma Nelson), has worked extremely hard to get great marks at school, and instead of wanting the pony she did when she was made that promise, she now wants a family trip to Antarctica. From ponies to penguins. Parents, never forget—your children never forget. They appear happy. Appearances can be deceiving.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is based on a novel by Maria Semple, a name I recognise from the writing credits of Arrested Development. Her literary work, unread by me, seems thematically interested in the identities women find themselves either with or without. Bernadette is friends with her daughter, but she may not be the best role model. She has a bitter rivalry with her neighbour, Audrey (Kristen Wiig), and has largely secluded herself from the public eye. It is a fair way into the film that we discover she was once an architect of some renown, whose work is greatly admired but also a source of personal anxiety. She is struggling to keep the brilliant creator separate from the “cool mom” who has some great advice for her daughter, like “popularity is overrated”. Of course the popular vote goes to it. There’s a great scene where Bernadette is singing along to Cyndi Lauper with Bee, and she breaks down crying in the car. She passes it off as the song making her emotional, but things are not great under the hood.
Billy Crudup plays the husband that loves his family, but perhaps doesn’t know the most sensitive ways of broaching his concerns with their struggles. He’s the sort of guy who loves his wife enough to want to help her through a possible mental breakdown, but is not emotionally intelligent enough to know that bringing his assistant, a psychiatrist and an FBI agent, to Bernadette’s living room for a surprise intervention in regards to her anxiety and paranoia is not the best idea. He’s not friends with his daughter, although he loves her, but he never gets mean about it. Emma Nelson doesn’t play a false note as the daughter of two brilliant people she loves but struggles to understand. She is friends with her mother, but sees a constructed side to her. When she fights with her father about the reality of her mother’s mental health, she is not dislikeable as the child who has clearly picked a side. The cast consists of a list of funny people and noteworthy actors, but the most impressive auxiliary performances come from Kristen Wiig as the pedantic and insincere neighbour and Laurence Fishburne as a former colleague of Bernadette’s who gets the privilege of revealing the film’s true message.
Linklater uses technology to age-down his actors in scenes that are perhaps not as necessary as they are impressive. I think he’s a little way off a Before Sunrise (1995) sequel set in 1998, but he’s playing with the boundaries of what is possible here. As an auteur who followed people around for a long time—in the case of Boyhood (2014), for years—it must be harrowing for him to see technology opening up in a way that allows him to travel through time he had to labour through in his earlier career. But he does not seem bitter or shy about it, but rather embraces it like an architect looking for that contemporary project. It’s not surprising that Linklater finds something alluring about architects, who create something both in the now, but also for the future, that is hopefully going to stand the test of time even as lives change around it.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is not the best work of Linklater’s career, and I cannot speak to the justice he has done Semple’s award-winning novel (which stayed on the New York Times Bestseller List for a year, but what is popularity?). Like his best films, however, it makes you think, and it tells a story so specific that it feels bizarrely universal. The performances and direction of the film come together in a way that there’s definitely something to appreciate here, even if the film doesn’t quite come together as the masterpiece Linklater and his cast are capable of. Sometimes a film just comes about because people wanted to make it. Like a nice building with a odd chandelier: it may not have been your choice for a chandelier, but you enjoy that it was someone else’s.
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